Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Engineers are not an endangered species, according to GitLab’s CEO, William Staples.On an earnings call for the code management software company on Tuesday, Staples said AI coding assistants will increase the number of engineers because people can now code without advanced technical skills.”There’s a raging debate about this, and I think a lot of it is borne out of anxiety about the future by engineers,” Staples said. Staples said throughout his 30-year career, he has seen advances in productivity that appear to make engineering skills less necessary.”This one is definitely stronger than other times because of the power of AI,”…

In an age where meetings multiply and inboxes overflow, a weekly recap email can help save time and keep leadership aligned. A senior engineering exec at Roblox swears by it.Sebastian Barrios, a senior vice president of engineering at the gaming platform, said he sends his CEO a weekly email outlining his accomplishments, what’s next on his plate, and where he needs help.”It helps me keep track of what’s working, what’s not working,” Barrios said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Sunday. “I don’t actually have an expectation that people are going to send that to me — it’s something…

GRAZ, Austria (AP) — Investigators found a farewell letter and a non-functional pipe bomb when they searched the home of a man who opened fire at his former school in Austria, killing 10 people and taking his own life, police said Wednesday.As Austria mourned the victims of what appeared to be the deadliest attack in its post-World War II history, with a national minute of silence planned Wednesday morning, questions remained about the motive of the shooter. The 21-year-old Austrian man lived near Graz and was a former student at the BORG Dreierschützengasse high school, in Austria’s second-biggest city, who…

Elon Musk just dropped a tentative launch date for Tesla’s highly anticipated robotaxi service, which will compete with Alphabet’s Waymo in Austin.Musk said on Tuesday evening, in response to a user on X, that Tesla will begin offering rides to the public “Tentatively, June 22.” However, he noted that it’s not a date set in stone.”We are being super paranoid about safety, so the date could shift,” Musk wrote. “First Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28.”Musk previously said that the initial rollout would include 10 to 20 driverless…

The release of OpenAI’s first open model in years will be delayed until later this summer, CEO Sam Altman announced in a post on X on Tuesday. Altman said the open model would be released sometime after June. “[W]e are going to take a little more time with our open-weights model, i.e. expect it later this summer but not [J]une,” he wrote. “[O]ur research team did something unexpected and quite amazing and we think it will be very very worth the wait, but needs a bit longer.” we are going to take a little more time with our open-weights model,…

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The only bright side for the U.S. soccer team is the World Cup starts in a year, not this week.The Americans conceded four goals in the first half, failed to get a shot on target and were embarrassed in a 4-0 blowout loss to Switzerland in a friendly on Tuesday night.“It’s really easy to look at one game, one half, and be like, oh, this is all going to pieces, they can’t come back from this,” defender Walker Zimmerman said. “But you look even the build-up to the 2022 (World Cup), we take down Morocco 3-0…

Google expanded its return-to-office mandate and offered voluntary buyouts for some US-based employees on Tuesday, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.Employees on Google’s Core, Marketing, Research, Knowledge & Information (K&I), and Communications teams all received the buyout offers. K&I includes teams working on Search, ads and commerce.The return-to-office requirement expands the company’s 2022 RTO mandate, which asked some US-based teams to come into the office 3 days a week, while still offering “work from anywhere” weeks.The company will now require all remote employees on affected teams who live within 50 miles of an office to return to…

It looks like Tesla robotaxi season is upon us.Elon Musk has responded to a widely shared video of a Tesla driving around emblazoned with “Robotaxi” in a font style similar to the Cybertruck’s branding.”Beautifully simple design,” the Tesla CEO said when re-sharing the video, which shows a refreshed Model Y — seemingly with no one in the driver’s seat — making a left-hand turn.”These are unmodified Tesla cars coming straight from the factory, meaning that every Tesla coming out of our factories is capable of unsupervised self-driving,” Musk said in another response.Tesla’s VP of Autopilot and AI, Ashok Elluswamy, also…

Vast Data, which offers an AI-friendly data storage platform, is in the market to raise a new round at a giant leap in valuation. Earlier this year, the 9-year-old company was seeking a valuation of around $25 billion, according to a person familiar with the deal. Should it achieve that, it would be a massive jump from its $9 billion Series E valuation secured in December 2023. The deal was not finalized, and terms — including its valuation — could change, this person said, adding that the requested valuation was high at the time, despite impressive growth. Many VCs are…

If you’ve upgraded to a newer iPhone model recently, you’ve probably noticed that Apple Intelligence is showing up in some of your most-used apps, like Messages, Mail, and Notes. Apple Intelligence (yes, also abbreviated to AI) showed up in Apple’s ecosystem in October 2024, and it’s here to stay as Apple competes with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to build the best AI tools. What is Apple Intelligence? Image Credits:Apple Cupertino marketing executives have branded Apple Intelligence: “AI for the rest of us.” The platform is designed to leverage the things that generative AI already does well, like text and…